Quotulatiousness

September 3, 2013

Britain’s new aircraft carriers in the news again

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

It’s from the Daily Mail, so a certain level of de-hystericization is called for…along with salt to taste. First, the discovery that the two carriers will initially be without radar for early warning of incoming planes and missiles:

The Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers could set sail without a crucial radar which warns commanders of incoming enemy warplanes and missiles.

A damning report by MPs reveals the Crowsnest early warning system will not be ready until six years after the first of the £5.5billion Queen Elizabeth-class warships enters service in 2016.

Delays in fitting the ‘eyes in the sky’ system to military helicopters until 2022 were a ‘concern’, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says today.

And the costs incurred by changing the planned acquisition of F-35 aircraft to equip the carriers is rather eye-watering:

The bill for the two new warships, given the green light in 2008, is almost twice the original £3.6billion — and there are ‘huge risks’ it will increase further, says the report.

MPs heap criticism on the Coalition for wasting money after a U-turn over the type of warplanes to fly from the aircraft carriers.

In 2010 ministers controversially decided to scrap the last Labour government’s plans to buy a fleet of jump jets, which take off and land vertically.

Instead, Prime Minister David Cameron ordered conventional versions of the US-built F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that would need catapults and arrester gear to take off from and land on the vessels.

But this was based on ‘deeply flawed information’, say the committee. When the cost of fitting the ships with ‘cats and traps’ more than doubled to £2billion, Mr Cameron flip-flopped and returned to buying the jump jet.

The move cost a staggering £74million in squandered in lost man hours, administrative costs and needless planning.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, the PAC’s chairman, said: ‘The Committee is still not convinced that the MOD has this programme under control. It remains subject to huge technical and commercial risks, with the potential for further uncontrolled growth in costs.’

Queen Elizabeth class side and overhead views

Queen Elizabeth class side and overhead views

The switch back to the jump jet was made last year. Back in 2010, I was rather pessimistic that the carriers would even be built and I suggested that India would likely take them off the Royal Navy’s hands once they were complete.

July 14, 2013

“The very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

At the Anti-War blog, John Glaser looks at the ongoing costs of empire:

In Foreign Affairs, Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Riedel suggest a cost-saving measure for America’s empire in the Middle East: opening more U.S. military bases in the region. Instead of relying as it has on expensive “aircraft carriers in and near the Persian Gulf,” the U.S. should move its military presence back onto land in at least three different Gulf states.

The primary purpose of having U.S. military bases peppered throughout the Middle East has traditionally been to exert control over geo-politically vital oil-rich countries and to allow for a rapid and coordinated use of military force at Washington’s command. As a Top Secret National Security Council briefing put it in 1954, “the Near East is of great strategic, political, and economic importance,” as it “contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world” as well as “essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.”

O’Hanlon and Riedel don’t even consider the legitimacy of America’s military presence in the Middle East; for them, it is a natural law that can’t be questioned. So when faced with strained budgets that can’t support a sprawling, costly, and unwarranted empire, they try to figure minor cost cutting measures around the edges instead of reevaluating our military postures as a whole.

A CSIS report last year took a different tack, arguing that “disappearing finances; rising alternative power centers; declining US military predominance; lack of efficacy of key non-military instruments of power; and reduced domestic patience for global adventures,” all require a rethinking of U.S. grand strategy with an eye towards roll-back.

    The very definition of grand strategy is holding ends and means in balance to promote the security and interests of the state. Yet, the post-war US approach to strategy is rapidly becoming insolvent and unsustainable – not only because Washington can no longer afford it but also, crucially, because it presumes an American relationship with friends, allies, and rivals that is the hallmark of a bygone era. If Washington continues to cling to its existing role on the premise that the international order depends upon it, the result will be increasing resistance, economic ruin, and strategic failure.

That first sentence there is one of the most honest you’ll ever see from an elite DC foreign policy think tank. U.S. foreign policy is ultimately promoting “the security and interests of the state.” It isn’t for your sake. It benefits the government and the private interests aligned with it.

July 7, 2013

More details on US Army’s re-organization plans

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Strategy Page updates the headline news about the US Army disbanding over a dozen combat brigades in the most recent military cutbacks:

The U.S. Army recently announced its plan to reduce its 45 combat brigades to 32 but to retain most of the combat capabilities of the 45 brigade force. This will be done by transferring many of the troops and equipment from the disbanded brigades to the 32 that will remain in service. This will increase most brigades to 4,500 troops. Each new brigade will have three infantry or armor battalions (instead of two, as most now do) 18 (instead of 16) 155mm self-propelled artillery vehicles (organized into three batteries instead of two) and more engineer troops (the equivalent of a battalion) for each brigade. The new BCTs (Brigade Combat Teams) will initially consist of 14 infantry (two infantry and one tank battalion), 12 tank (two tank and one infantry battalion) and seven Stryker battalions. Three of these 35 brigades will be disbanded over the next few years, but which ones has not been decided yet. By late 2017 the army expects to reduce personnel strength ten percent (to 490,000 troops from the current 547,000).

All this shrinking is due to the fact that the army is facing some hefty budget cuts (at least 5-10 percent over the next decade). Linked with growing costs (for equipment, supplies and wages) makes this cut even larger. For example, over the next decade, defense spending will decline from 3.6 percent to 2.8 percent of GDP. Several years ago the army did the math and concluded that it would have to cut manpower up to 80,000 by the end of the next decade, and reduce combat brigades to as few as 32 (from the current 45) and total strength of 490,000 troops. Without the cuts training would have to be cut to the point where the troops would be unprepared for combat. The recent announcement simply confirms the initial army estimates.

These cuts are nothing new, as army leaders have seen it coming for some time. Four years ago, despite major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army went through a major reorganization. The end result was the increase in the number of combat brigades from 33 to 48 (soon reduced to 45 because of budget cuts). This required the transfer of over 40,000 people from combat-support jobs to the combat brigades. In doing this, the army got some experience in reducing personnel strength without losing capability. Most of this reset was completed, with all the new brigades ready for service, by 2010.

April 4, 2013

Harper Conservatives actually love big government … but on the cheap

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

Stephen Gordon points out that the “small government” rhetoric from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives is so much hot air:

If asked, the Conservatives will tell you that they favour a smaller government that intervenes sparingly in the functioning of the market, and it’s been pretty well-established that a medium- and long-term goal of the Conservative government has been to reduce the share of Canadian GDP that is taxed and spent by the federal government. But lower taxes and lower levels of spending are not the same thing as a smaller government.

Here are the highlights (sic) of the “Strengthening the Competitiveness of the Manufacturing Sector” section of Chapter 3.2 of the budget plan:

[. . .]

  • $920 million to renew the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) for five years, starting on April 1, 2014. Seriously? A slush fund economic development agency for Southern Ontario?
  • $200 million for a new Advanced Manufacturing Fund in Ontario for five years, starting on April 1, 2014, funded from the renewed FedDev Ontario. More pork to be distributed to firms that enjoy the favour of the government.
  • Building on the success of the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, the Government will better ensure that purchases of military equipment create economic opportunities for Canadians by developing key domestic industrial capabilities to help guide procurement, by promoting export opportunities, and by reforming the current procurement process to improve outcomes. The Conservatives can’t even be bothered to sustain the fiction that government procurement should be aimed at obtaining the best value for the taxpayer. Public money is to be spent where politicians want to see public money being spent.

[. . .]

You don’t need a big government to interfere with markets, or to weaken property rights and the rule of law. The decision to forbid shareholders of Potash Corp from selling their holdings to BHP Billiton didn’t cost the federal government a dime. Nor did instructing banks to not offer lower mortgage rates. And then there’s the example of the government’s preference for the clumsy and heavy hand of regulation over more efficient, market-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I don’t think it’s quite correct to say that the Conservatives want a smaller government. They seem happy to run a government that is as big and dumb as its predecessors — so long as it’s cheap.

April 1, 2013

US Army forced by sequester cuts to eliminate several medals

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

The Duffel Blog is your source for all breaking US military news:

Lt. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, the Army G-1, explained, “the amount of money spent on ribbons and medals has increased exponentially over the decades.” As proof, Bromberg pointed to a picture of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general, who was bedecked with only three ribbons.

“Today, we’d look at a private with only three ribbons as if he were some sort of dirtbag,” said Bromberg.

Although no final list had been decided upon, one Army spokesperson said that several ribbons were all but certain to be canned.

“The Army Service Ribbon? What the hell?,” asked the spokesman. “The fact that you’re in an Army uniform is proof of your army service. Why should I give you a damn ribbon?”

Army officials would neither confirm nor deny the fate of the National Defense Medal. One simply said, “So you were drinking beer in Germany, while the entire U.S. military was fighting Desert Storm? Remind us, again, why you deserve a medal?”

The Army indicated they would be cutting medals incrementally, starting with “I have a pulse”-tier awards, followed by “Thanks for showing up” awards, and finally, “I did an okay job” awards. Altogether, the program is expected to save $37 billion over the next decade.

Canadian government pre-approves Cyprus-style haircuts for bank depositors

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Not only can it happen here, but Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is making it explicit that it will happen here:

The politicians of the western world are coming after your bank accounts. In fact, Cyprus-style “bail-ins” are actually proposed in the new Canadian government budget. When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons.

This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted. So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU.

I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is. From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.

What you are about to see absolutely amazed me when I first saw it. The Canadian government is actually proposing that what just happened in Cyprus should be used as a blueprint for future bank failures up in Canada.

March 31, 2013

Ralph Klein, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

In Maclean’s, Colby Cosh talks about the late former premier of Alberta:

Ralph Klein, the former premier of Alberta, has died at 70. He shall not now ever be able to collect on the vast debt of apologies he is owed by calumniators, false chroniclers, lazy pundits, and political enemies. The misunderstandings of Ralph have been copious and mostly deliberate. He is still routinely characterized as an anti-gay social conservative in league with sinister theocratic forces, even though he was personally about as churchy as an alley cat. More importantly, he took a diamond-hard line against the use of the “notwithstanding” clause after the Supreme Court wrote sexual orientation into Alberta’s discrimination law in the Vriend decision; and he insisted the public accept the court’s verdict.

He is accused of failing to maximize the public benefits of Alberta’s resource wealth and “save” oil and gas funds for the future, although government resource revenues grew more than fourfold in his 14 years as premier and the net financial position of the province improved by $43 billion. Both promptly collapsed under his bamboozled successor Ed Stelmach, and have not yet recovered to Ralphian levels. Klein is also charged with failing to pay enough conscious attention to economic diversification, a concept that served as the pretext for a hundred costly boondoggles under earlier Conservative regimes; yet somehow he succeeded in presiding over an Alberta economy whose GDP moved sharply away from energy-dependence, and which saw the emergence of previously unimaginable non-energy businesses like software maker Matrikon and game manufacturer BioWare. Whether or not you care to give an iota of credit to Klein, his rule coincided with Alberta becoming a place young technicians and entrepreneurs don’t have to be stupid not to leave.

[. . .]

There is a basic failure among diehard enemies of the Klein government to accept the evidence that his energy, privatization, and flat-tax policies increased the Alberta government’s capacity to spend and provide services — that the more we got of Klein, the safer and more lavish their cherished government entitlements appeared to be. They are not at all safe now; the profoundest irony of Klein’s demise is that it has arrived at a moment in which present premier Alison Redford faces choices like those Klein confronted when he captured the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1992.

Indeed, when Redford’s heavily obfuscated budget plans are translated into English, one sees that the next few years in Alberta must inevitably resemble the early days of Kleinism. Premier Redford is trying to protect spending on infrastructure to prevent a “deficit” in upkeep on buildings and transport, of the sort that materialized after Klein’s initial austerities. But operational spending, particularly on personnel expenses, is bound to be slashed, Klein-fashion. And the slashes will have to be all the deeper if the bridges are going to get painted. A fierce fight with the public sector (whose unfunded pension liabilities grew 80% between Klein’s last budget and Stelmach’s second) is already taking shape, with teachers, doctors, and pharmacists on the verge of all-out war over their pay envelopes. Haven’t the Klein-haters who fell over themselves to vote for internationalist, socially concerned Alison seen this movie before?

March 28, 2013

Paul Wells: They didn’t call it a budget because it isn’t a budget

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:48

For example, a budget would actually provide you with comprehensible statements of anticipated revenues and spending for all the big ticket items:

I work in Ottawa and I try to stay on top of things, but this was news to me. In fact, I didn’t even notice it until four days after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released his — er — plan on March 21. Of course, there was much chortling in the press gallery at the government’s insistence on calling its annual account of revenues and expenses something besides a budget. But the significance of the thing took a while to sink in. Flaherty and his boss, Stephen Harper, do not call their big annual document a “budget” anymore because it is no longer a budget.

A budget, as anyone who has tried to run a household knows, is the moment when you stop telling yourself soothing tales and inject a note of reality into your life. On page 64 of the 1997 budget, for instance, the government of the day gave us an “outlook for program spending” with multi-year projections for spending levels in defence, Aboriginal programs, “business subsidies” and so on. It was that straightforward.

Harper’s Economic Action Plans, by contrast, are carnivals of fantasy. EAP13 — we will use the government-approved hashtag, which I assume is pronounced to sound like a shriek of terror — is 200 pages longer than Budget 1997 but finds no room for a one-page program-spending outlook, nor indeed for a program-spending outlook of any length. Like the best funhouses, this one depends on its volume for much of its amusement value. The decision to merge CIDA into the Foreign Affairs Department is announced on the 31st page of a chapter on “supporting families and communities,” and I can only assume it is there as a reward for perseverance. The morning after Flaherty’s speech, a diplomat asked me how it is possible for a G7 country to release a budget that does not at any point say how much the government will spend on defence next year. I gave the fellow a long answer. I should have said his premise was wrong, because — stop me if you’ve heard this — it’s not a budget.

March 25, 2013

Budget Day was also apparently opposite day

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon give props to the spinmeisters in the employ of the federal government:

Full credit to the government’s communications strategists: they managed to produce budget-day headlines that said the exact opposite of what was in the budget.

The first thing I read on the morning of budget day was the National Post story about cutting tariffs on hockey gear. There was also a matching A1 story in the Globe and Mail and I walked to the budget lockup in a cheerful mood. Even though the numbers involved were tiny, I couldn’t help but feel encouraged about how the measure was being marketed. Almost without exception, trade liberalisation is presented as a concession to the demands of foreign exporters, but the real gains from trade are those obtained from being able to purchase cheaper imports. These gains can be obtained by reducing tariffs unilaterally – the most famous example is the repeal of the the UK Corn Laws in 1849. There was no drawn-out process of negotiations with corn (wheat) exporters in other countries: the UK government simply eliminated tariffs so that the population could have cheaper food. The morning headlines led me to believe that our government was going to implement a unilateral tariff reduction for the simplest and best reason: because it increased consumers’ purchasing power.

I was wrong, of course. Yes, there were those 37 tariff reductions, but there was also the measure to ‘modernize’ Canada’s General Preferential Tariff (GPT) regime by ‘graduating’ 72 countries from the GPT; imports from these countries will now face higher tariffs. Mike Moffatt estimates that those 37 tariff reductions will be accompanied by 1290 tariff increases. [. . .]

So instead of a unilateral reduction in tariffs, the government is planning a unilateral increase. This is not how a pro-trade government behaves.

March 20, 2013

Paul Wells says Harper and Flaherty have learned a lot about budgeting

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a good thing:

One thing Stephen Harper learned soon after he became Prime Minister was that Canadians have little intuitive grasp of decimal places. A government does not get 1,000 times more credit for spending $1 billion on something than it does for spending $1 million. In fact, it does not get twice as much credit. As long as the government notices a problem and nods at it, it wins approval from voters who care about that problem. So not long after his man Jim Flaherty started delivering budgets, a Harper era of small and essentially symbolic investment began.

Similarly, the ability to tell the difference between a little belt-tightening and a wholesale cut to a government service or department is not a widespread skill. So as long as the government offers only the vaguest information about its spending cuts, few Canadians will go searching for details.

This general numerical dyslexia will come in handy this year more than most, as Jim Flaherty tries to meet a zero-deficit target that is suddenly rather close — 2015, give or take — while dealing with a lousy economy.

March 15, 2013

The real cuts to the military budget

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Maclean’s, John Geddes examines the way budget cutbacks are being implemented in Canada’s military:

Perry’s fine-grained analysis starts by setting aside the major parts of defence spending that are, at least in theory, protected from cuts. Last year’s fiscal plan called for more than $1 billion a year to be cut from the defence department’s overall budget of more than $20 billion by 2014-15. That doesn’t seem so tough. But the Conservatives pledged to do that while keeping up the troop strength of the Canadian Forces, at about 68,000 regular members and 27,000 in the reserves, and also protecting most planned capital spending. According to Perry, that means about $12 billion a year was deemed uncuttable — leaving all the reductions to be found somehow in the remaining $8 billion that is spent on the civilian workforce and on military “operations, maintenance and readiness.”

How hard is it to achieve those savings? The clearest indication so far came from Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, the commander of the army, in surprising testimony he gave late last year before a Senate committee. Devlin said his land force’s operating budget has been shrunk by an eye-popping 22 per cent—a figure that doesn’t show up anywhere in publicly available defence documents. “As you would expect,” Devlin said with classic officer-class understatement, “that has an effect on people, infrastructure and training.” And he took pains to counter any suggestion that the army should be eliminating desk jobs to save field assets, stressing that administrative and head-office functions occupy only four per cent of his workforce.

[. . .]

Harper’s letter echoed the thrust of Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie’s 2011 “transformation” report. Leslie, who has since retired, conducted an extensive study of defence spending and concluded that the department must “ruthlessly focus” on reducing its spending on outside consultants and private contractors, with the aim of redistributing resources to military units. He delivered his report two years ago. Yet the latest figures available show that the defence department’s spending on professional services and consultants continued to climb to $3.25 billion in 2011-12 from $2.77 billion in 2009-10. And that increase came after a period when head-office growth outstripped the expansion of the fighting forces. According to Leslie’s report, headquarters personnel numbers grew 40 per cent from 2004 to 2010, while the regular forces grew by just 11 per cent.

March 12, 2013

US Army to standardize on four current UAV models

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The US Army reasonably expects their budget to be under strain for some time. Here’s at least one sensible economy move:

Faced with smaller budgets over the next decade the U.S. Army has halted evaluation of new UAVs and is standardizing on four existing models (Gray Eagle, Shadow 2000, Raven and Puma). All four of these were developed and purchased in large quantities over the last dozen years and will remain the primary army UAVs for the next 5-10 years.

The army currently has nearly 7,000 UAVs. Over 6,000 are micro-UAVs like the Raven and Puma, These tiny (under six kg/13.2 pound) reconnaissance aircraft have become very popular with the troops, anyone of which can become an operator after a few hours of training. These tiny UAVs are a radical new military aircraft technology that is took air recon to a new level. That level is low, a few hundred meters off the ground. The army has nearly 1,798 Raven and 325 Puma UAVs systems in use by ground troops. A complete system (controller, spare parts, and three UAVs) costs $250,000 for the Raven and over $400,000 for Puma. These tiny aircraft have changed how the troops fight and greatly reduced army dependence on the air force for air reconnaissance. The lightweight, hand launched Raven UAV can only stay airborne about an hour per sortie, but troops have found that this is enough time to do all sorts of useful work, even when there’s no fighting going on. This is most of the time. The heavier Puma can stay up for 120 minutes.

March 10, 2013

Lockheed Martin’s budgetary force-field

Filed under: Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

In the Washington Post, along with asking why “the Navy’s Army needs its own Air Force”, Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains why the F-35 is close to un-killable:

The Defense Department and Lockheed Martin, the giant contractor hired to design and build the plane, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, have constructed what amounts to a budgetary force field around the nearly $400 billion program.

Although it is the costliest weapons system in U.S. history and the single most expensive item in the 2013 Pentagon budget, it will face only a glancing blow from the sequester this year. And as the White House and Congress contemplate future budgets, those pushing for additional cuts may find it difficult to trim more than a fraction of the Pentagon’s proposed fleet, even though the program is years behind schedule and 70 percent over its initial price tag.

The reasons for the F-35’s relative immunity are a stark illustration of why it is so difficult to cut the country’s defense spending. Lockheed Martin has spread the work across 45 states — critics call it “political engineering” — which in turn has generated broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Any reduction in the planned U.S. purchase risks antagonizing the eight other nations that have committed to buying the aircraft by increasing their per-plane costs. And senior military leaders warn that the stealthy, technologically sophisticated F-35 is essential to confront Iran, China and other potential adversaries that may employ advanced anti-aircraft defenses.

The biggest barrier to cutting the F-35 program, however, is rooted in the way in which it was developed: The fighter jet is being mass-produced and placed in the hands of military aviators such as Walsh, who are not test pilots, while the aircraft remains a work in progress. Millions more lines of software code have to be written, vital parts need to be redesigned, and the plane has yet to complete 80 percent of its required flight tests. By the time all that is finished — in 2017, by the Pentagon’s estimates — it will be too late to pull the plug. The military will own 365 of them.

By then, “we’re already pregnant,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, who oversees F-35 development for the Pentagon.

March 7, 2013

QotD: When bureaucrats have to cut back

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and national government responses to budget cuts.

At the local level, the first response to budget cuts is often to cut the police department and the fire department. There may be all sorts of wasteful boondoggles that could have been cut instead, but that would not produce the public alarm that reducing police protection and fire protection can produce. And public alarm is what can get budget cuts restored.

Thomas Sowell, “Will Obama turn the United States into the world’s largest banana republic?”, Washington Examiner, 2013-03-04

March 2, 2013

A 2% budget cut should not impact day-to-day services

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

In the Washington Times, Gary Johnson looks at the wild claims about what the sequester will do to the services Americans receive from the federal government:

To listen to the parade of Obama administration officials warning of civilization-ending consequences from the measly $85 billion in spending “cuts” sequestration will bring, one can only reach one of two conclusions: Either they are just making stuff up to make the cuts as painful as possible, or the federal budget is so out of control that a mere 2.4 percent reduction in projected spending is more than the system can handle.

Frankly, it is both. Absolutely, in their zeal to make Republicans pay the maximum political price for what is actually both parties’ fault, it is almost comical to watch one Cabinet official after another step up to the microphone and tell us that a 2.4 percent reduction (that isn’t really a reduction) will cause airplanes to fall out of the sky, our national defense to be disabled and our children to starve. That game is among the oldest in Washington. Cut the Park Service budget, and suddenly they can’t find the money to keep the Lincoln Memorial or Yellowstone open.

This sideshow is entertaining, but it misses what may be the most important lesson to be learned from this sequester debacle. While there is certainly a heavy dose of Chicken Little falling-sky rhetoric coming out of the bureaucracy, it is probably true that the rather indiscriminate sequester formula is presenting some challenges for some agencies.

[. . .]

If “cutting” discretionary spending by a lousy 2 or 3 cents on the dollar is enough to create dire consequences (for the sake of argument), imagine what would happen if we tried to reduce that spending by the 30 cents it will take to balance the budget and stop digging ourselves even deeper into unsustainable debt.

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